Chapter 61
The morning they left, Rachel tightened her pack straps and felt scar tissue tug beneath her ribs.
The ache had dulled, though it still pressed deep enough that she adjusted the left strap twice before it settled.
Her side would hurt for weeks. She knew that and kept going.
Brenton was west. Hannah and Caleb were west. Pain was only another thing she had to carry on the way to the answers she needed.
Sophie walked beside her with both packs secured, watching the road ahead.
The rain had stopped two days earlier. It left the gravel drive wet enough to mark their boots and cleared the air until Rachel could see the tree line thinning west of the county route.
They had four days of food left. The water bottles were full.
The revolver sat at the bottom of Rachel’s pack, where it had been since Thomas gave his final instruction.
Neither of them mentioned the fever days at the Grange Hall.
The county route number appeared on a faded green sign.
Rachel stopped and stared at it. The number belonged to a road she’d driven during a child-services case three years earlier.
The family had lived in a trailer set back from a creek, and the mother had stayed sober long enough that Rachel had felt close to hope when she closed the file.
The road looked different without traffic or working utilities, yet the curve beyond the sign was familiar enough to tighten her stomach.
“It’s the right road,” Rachel said.
“I figured,” Sophie said.
An intersection appeared a mile later beside a white clapboard church with boarded windows.
Rachel remembered stopping there with Hannah six years before, on a winter drive home from a dentist appointment.
Hannah had been ten, maybe eleven, and she had asked why churches needed such tall windows if nobody looked through them.
Rachel had given an adult answer about light and symbolism.
Hannah had rolled her eyes and returned to her book.
The memory hit harder than Rachel had expected.
She slowed without meaning to, and Sophie let the silence hold.
By midday, Rachel no longer needed the map for every turn.
She folded it and tucked it into her back pocket.
The roads led toward towns she’d visited from Brenton during fourteen years of county work.
She knew which intersections connected to which county routes.
She knew where pavement usually ended and gravel began.
Familiarity made her move faster. Her boots found a rhythm her healing body couldn’t match, and Sophie told her to slow down twice before Rachel managed to listen.
“Your side is going to open again if you walk like you’re being chased,” Sophie said.
“I’m fine,” Rachel replied.
“You’re walking like somebody promised you a million dollars if you got there by sunset. Slow down.”
Rachel slowed. The pain beneath her ribs had begun to warm again, spreading upward along the scar in a thin warning line.
She adjusted her pace and hated every step of the compromise.
The wagon appeared around a bend in the road.
It was horse drawn, wooden, and loaded with grain sacks stacked three high across the bed.
Household belongings filled the rest of the space.
A man walked beside the front wheel with the reins in one hand.
A woman followed behind and led a second horse on a rope tether.
The second animal shied whenever the wagon hit ruts or the wind shifted.
The family stopped when they saw Rachel and Sophie.
The man studied them from twenty yards away, measuring distance, packs, posture, and risk.
His wife held on to the second horse while the children watched from the wagon bed.
“Heading west?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Rachel said.
“Brenton?”
“Eventually.”
The man nodded. His eyes moved to Sophie, then back to Rachel’s side where the pack strap pressed against her coat. He’d noticed the way she stood. Rachel had spent enough time with Thomas Keller to recognize a farmer weighing help against risk.
“We’re heading as far as Millerton. After that, south toward my brother’s place. We’ve got room for one more if she’s willing to walk when the grade gets steep. The second horse doesn’t like extra weight, and the wagon axles are already carrying too much,” the man said.
“I can help with the children, the supplies, whatever you need managed. She walks fine. Better than I do right now,” Rachel said.
The negotiation took less than a minute.
Rachel climbed into the wagon bed beside the grain sacks and settled between a crate of hand tools and a canvas bundle that smelled of smoked meat.
Sophie stayed on the ground beside the rear wheel, matching the wagon’s pace with the easy stride she had developed over weeks on the road.
The miles began to disappear. Rachel hadn’t realized how much difference a wagon made until the first hour passed, and she watched the landscape shift around them without the constant need to adjust her pack.
She helped the farmer’s children sort through a bag of scavenged toys.
The boy was seven or eight. The girl was younger and quiet, with steady eyes and patience for silence.
When the road climbed toward a ridge, Sophie walked beside the wagon with one hand on the wooden side.
The second horse grew agitated on the incline and pulled against its tether until the farmer’s wife planted her boots and steadied it with low, firm words.
Rachel watched Sophie study the animal with the same focus she had once given the railroad stalkers.
The girl had learned to read danger wherever it appeared.
By afternoon, Rachel recognized the next town before the road signs confirmed it.
Denfield. She had driven through it twice during home visits to a family living on the eastern edge of Brenton’s county service area.
The mother had kept the house clean despite the father’s absence and three months of unpaid utilities.
Rachel had helped secure an emergency payment to keep the power on, and she wondered whether the family had survived.